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Brain candy for Happy MutantsSun, 02 Aug 2015 19:28:50 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.2All 40 of the FBI & DHS's post-9/11 terror attack warnings fizzledhttp://boingboing.net/2015/07/05/all-40-of-the-fbi-dhss-pos.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/07/05/all-40-of-the-fbi-dhss-pos.html#commentsMon, 06 Jul 2015 05:51:52 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=402532
And yet, the press keeps on reporting these "reliable intelligence-based" reports of impending attacks on the "homeland" as though you should believe them.]]>
And yet, the press keeps on reporting these "reliable intelligence-based" reports of impending attacks on the "homeland" as though you should believe them.

Salted with the FBI's warnings are triumphant announcements of terrorists who were interrupted mid-plot, who inevitably turn out to be some mix of not-actually-terrorists or gormless-nuts-without-a-hope who've been entrapped by FBI provocateurs. The most recent example is the "50 ISIS arrests" leading up to July 4.

Actual attacks -- the Times Square Bomber, the underwear bomber, the shoe bomber, the Boston Marathon bombers -- occurred with no warning.

The problem is three fold:

1.
The FBI has all the incentive in the world to issue warnings and no incentive whatsoever to not issue warnings. Issuing warnings has no downside, while not doing so is all downside.

2.
The FBI, like all agencies of the government, does not operate in a political vacuum. Emphasizing the “ISIS threat” at home necessarily helps prop up the broader war effort the FBI’s boss, the president of the United States, must sell to a war-weary public. The incentive is to therefore highlight the smallest threats. This was a feature that did not go unnoticed during the Bush years, but has since fallen out of fashion.

3.
It has no actual utility. What does it mean to be “more vigilant”? It’s a vague call to alertness that officials, aside from “beefing up security” by local police, never quite explain what it means. If the FBI wanted to tell local police departments to up their security of the 4th of July weekend, surely they could do so quietly, without the chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security having to go on all major networks talking over b-roll of ISIS in apocalyptic terms.

http://boingboing.net/2015/07/05/all-40-of-the-fbi-dhss-pos.html/feed0BBC's list of pages de-indexed through Europe's "right to be forgotten"http://boingboing.net/2015/06/28/bbcs-list-of-pages-de-indexe.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/06/28/bbcs-list-of-pages-de-indexe.html#commentsMon, 29 Jun 2015 05:52:10 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=400690
Under a crazy, ineffectual EU court ruling, people can petition Google and its rivals to de-index news articles from their European search-results.]]>
Under a crazy, ineffectual EU court ruling, people can petition Google and its rivals to de-index news articles from their European search-results.

We are doing this primarily as a contribution to public policy. We think it is important that those with an interest in the “right to be forgotten” can ascertain which articles have been affected by the ruling. We hope it will contribute to the debate about this issue. We also think the integrity of the BBC's online archive is important and, although the pages concerned remain published on BBC Online, removal from Google searches makes parts of that archive harder to find.

The pages affected by delinking may disappear from Google searches, but they do still exist on BBC Online. David Jordan, the BBC’s Director of Editorial Policy and Standards, has written a blog post which explains how we view that archive as “a matter of historic public record" and, thus, something we alter only in exceptional circumstances. The BBC’s rules on deleting content from BBC Online are strict; in general, unless content is specifically made available only for a limited time, the assumption is that what we publish on BBC Online will become part of a permanently accessible archive. To do anything else risks reducing transparency and damaging trust.

http://boingboing.net/2015/06/28/bbcs-list-of-pages-de-indexe.html/feed0"Reporter" who wrote ridiculous story about Snowden leaks in China admits he was just acting as a government stenographerhttp://boingboing.net/2015/06/15/reporter-who-wrote-ridicul.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/06/15/reporter-who-wrote-ridicul.html#commentsTue, 16 Jun 2015 05:58:10 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=397700

Tom Harper wrote the ridiculous cover story in the Sunday Times in which anonymous government sources claimed that the Russians and Chinese had somehow gained the power to decrypt copies of the files Edward Snowden took from the NSA, depite the fact that these files were never in Russia and despite the fact that the UK government claims that when criminals use crypto on their communications, the state is powerless to decrypt them.

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Tom Harper wrote the ridiculous cover story in the Sunday Times in which anonymous government sources claimed that the Russians and Chinese had somehow gained the power to decrypt copies of the files Edward Snowden took from the NSA, depite the fact that these files were never in Russia and despite the fact that the UK government claims that when criminals use crypto on their communications, the state is powerless to decrypt them.

Harper went on CNN to talk about the story, and when he was questioned about his sources and methodologies, admitted that he just stated "the official position of the British government" without any critical thinking and without signposting the obvious logical flaws in that position.

Harper says he won't defend the bizarre conclusions his story draws, because "it's really for the British government to defend it."

It's funny, because the "official position" of the Prime Minister's Office is that there is "no evidence of anyone being harmed" by the leaks. The "official position" that Harper is referring to was given to him by anonymous sources in the spy agencies, who would not go on the record. This is a funny alternate meaning of "official," meaning "so silly I won't put my name to it."

It's then that he makes the "we just publish what we believe to be the position of the British government" claim. Howell then points to one of the many contradictions in the story: the idea that Russia/China hacked into the Snowden files... and the claim that they were just handed over. And again, Harper pleads ignorance. He's just the stenographer:

Again, sorry to just repeat myself, George, but we don't know, so we haven't written that in the paper. Um... you know, it could be either. It could be another scenario.

I mean, it could be that the great fairyland dragon from the 6th dimension dreamed up the Snowden documents and then gave them to Russia and China. Who the fuck knows? I'm just a reporter, man. Why would you ask me for evidence or facts? I'm just rewriting what some government guys told me!

Howell then points out that his story is just the British government's claims, and then asks about the MI6 "agents" that were supposedly moved, and again, Harper pleads ignorance:

http://boingboing.net/2015/06/15/reporter-who-wrote-ridicul.html/feed0Anti-corruption journalist immolated by cops, allegedly under orders from ministerhttp://boingboing.net/2015/06/15/anti-corruption-journalist-imm.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/06/15/anti-corruption-journalist-imm.html#commentsMon, 15 Jun 2015 17:19:28 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=397521
Jagendra Singh reported on corruption in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on his Facebook account, which allegedly prompted Ram Murti Singh Verma, a ruling party politician, to send police to his house to burn him alive; he died a week later of his injuries.]]>
Jagendra Singh reported on corruption in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on his Facebook account, which allegedly prompted Ram Murti Singh Verma, a ruling party politician, to send police to his house to burn him alive; he died a week later of his injuries.

Amnesty International is calling for an investigation. Police have opened a case against the minister and five others. They have made no arrests.

The attack happened after he published an article and posted allegations of corruption on Facebook against ruling party politician Ram Murti Singh Verma. He used an alias, but his true identity was quickly discovered by his enemies.

Police have registered a complaint of murder and criminal conspiracy against Mr Verma, who denies the charges.

Jagendra Singh's family has alleged that Mr Verma and a group of policemen assaulted the 42-year-old journalist at his home and then doused him with petrol and set him on fire.

A local police official claimed that Mr Singh had "committed suicide" when the police arrived at his house in Shahjahanpur district to "arrest him" in connection with a case.

The Murdoch-owned paper struck back by sending a copyright notice to The Intercept, claiming that the screenshot infringed, despite the clear fair use context (reproduction for the purpose of criticism and analysis).

http://boingboing.net/2015/06/15/sunday-times-sends-copyright-t.html/feed0Rupert Murdoch stepping down as Fox CEOhttp://boingboing.net/2015/06/11/rupert-murdoch-stepping-down-a.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/06/11/rupert-murdoch-stepping-down-a.html#commentsThu, 11 Jun 2015 15:32:59 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=396157
The media titan ran the company like a family business while enjoying access to titanic quantities of capital from investors who were denied access to the decision-making apparatus.]]>
The media titan ran the company like a family business while enjoying access to titanic quantities of capital from investors who were denied access to the decision-making apparatus.

The business's major investors have been wrestling with the Murdochs for years, trying to restructure the company on more democratic lines, without much success. Rupert Murdoch's son, James Murdoch (who seriously underperformed during the phone-hacking scandal) is taking over. It's not clear whether he'll be able to hold his own against the bruisers that his dad has kept at bay.

It's a high-stakes game. The Murdochs have used their media power to influence politics overtly (Fox News, The Sun) and covertly (using the publishing arm to pay giant sums to favored politicians for lame memoirs and anodyne columns). The company's shareholders are not nearly so interested in playing power-broker and are more interested in getting a return on their investment.

http://boingboing.net/2015/06/11/rupert-murdoch-stepping-down-a.html/feed0LA Times editorial board calls for prosecution of journalistic sourceshttp://boingboing.net/2015/06/07/la-times-editorial-board-calls.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/06/07/la-times-editorial-board-calls.html#commentsSun, 07 Jun 2015 13:53:09 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=394487
The LAT's editorial page calls for Snowden to return to the US to be put on trial because we live in a "society of laws," but this commitment to the rule of law only reaches to a single source, and not the many "unnamed sources" who reveal secrets that have been tacitly cleared by the US government.]]>
The LAT's editorial page calls for Snowden to return to the US to be put on trial because we live in a "society of laws," but this commitment to the rule of law only reaches to a single source, and not the many "unnamed sources" who reveal secrets that have been tacitly cleared by the US government.

I see this argument often and it’s hard to overstate how foul it is. To begin with, if someone really believes that, they should be demanding the imprisonment of every person who ever leaks information deemed “classified,” since it’s an argument that demands the prosecution of anyone who breaks the law, or at least “consequences” for them. That would mean dragging virtually all of Washington, which leaks constantly and daily, into a criminal court – to say nothing of their other crimes such as torture. But of course such high-minded media lectures about the “rule of law” are applied only to those who are averse to Washington’s halls of power, not to those who run them.

More important, Snowden was “prepared to accept the consequences.” When he decided to blow the whistle, he knew that there was a very high risk that he’d end up in a U.S. prison for decades – we though that’d be the most likely outcome – and yet he did it anyway. And even now, he has given up his family, his home, his career, and his ability to travel freely – hardly someone free of “consequences.”

But that doesn’t mean he has to meekly crawl to American authorities with his wrists extended and politely ask to be put in cage for 30 years, almost certainly in some inhumane level of penal oppression typically reserved for Muslims and those accused of national security crimes. The idea that anyone who breaks an unjust law has a moral obligation to submit to an unjust penal state and accept lengthy imprisonment is noxious and authoritarian.

Without making any comparisons but instead just to illustrate the principle involved: anyone decent regards Nelson Mandela as a heroic moral actor, but he didn’t submissively turn himself into the South African government in order to be imprisoned. Instead, he avoided criminal prosecution for as long as he could by evading arrest and remaining a fugitive (and was captured only when the CIA, which regarded him as a “terrorist,” helped its apartheid allies find and apprehend him).

Third, anyone who has even casually watched the post-9/11 American judicial system knows what an absurdity it is to claim that Snowden would receive a fair trial. He’s barred under the Espionage Act even from arguing that his leaks were justified; he wouldn’t be permitted to utter a word about that. The American judiciary has been almost uniformly subservient to the U.S. Government in national security prosecutions. And the series of laws that have been enacted in the name of terrorism almost guarantee conviction in such cases.

http://boingboing.net/2015/06/07/la-times-editorial-board-calls.html/feed0Russia's troll factoryhttp://boingboing.net/2015/06/02/russias-troll-factory.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/06/02/russias-troll-factory.html#commentsTue, 02 Jun 2015 18:12:23 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=393245
An outstanding expose of Internet Research Agency, a St Petersburg, Russia-based army of trolls for hire who post pro-Kremlin messages to comment forums all day.]]>
An outstanding expose of Internet Research Agency, a St Petersburg, Russia-based army of trolls for hire who post pro-Kremlin messages to comment forums all day.

Lots of people troll, but IRA's management have elevated trolling to a science, running it like any other metrics-obsessed content-farm. They're well-paid, but work gruelling, 12-hour days. Most interesting of all, Adrian Chen, who wrote the story, became the center of a trolling/propaganda campaign that he was set up for while he was on the story.

Every day at the Internet Research Agency was essentially the same, Savchuk told me. The first thing employees did upon arriving at their desks was to switch on an Internet proxy service, which hid their I.P. addresses from the places they posted; those digital addresses can sometimes be used to reveal the real identity of the poster. Savchuk would be given a list of the opinions she was responsible for promulgating that day. Workers received a constant stream of “technical tasks” — point-by-point exegeses of the themes they were to address, all pegged to the latest news. Ukraine was always a major topic, because of the civil war there between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian Army; Savchuk and her co-workers would post comments that disparaged the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, and highlighted Ukrainian Army atrocities. Russian domestic affairs were also a major topic. Last year, after a financial crisis hit Russia and the ruble collapsed, the professional trolls left optimistic posts about the pace of recovery. Savchuk also says that in March, after the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered, she and her entire team were moved to the department that left comments on the websites of Russian news outlets and ordered to suggest that the opposition itself had set up the murder.

Savchuk told me she shared an office with about a half-dozen teammates. It was smaller than most, because she worked in the elite Special Projects department. While other workers churned out blandly pro-Kremlin comments, her department created appealing online characters who were supposed to stand out from the horde. Savchuk posed as three of these creations, running a blog for each one on LiveJournal. One alter ego was a fortuneteller named Cantadora. The spirit world offered Cantadora insight into relationships, weight loss, feng shui — and, occasionally, geopolitics. Energies she discerned in the universe invariably showed that its arc bent toward Russia. She foretold glory for Vladimir Putin, defeat for Barack Obama and Petro Poroshenko. The point was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person.

http://boingboing.net/2015/06/02/russias-troll-factory.html/feed0It's pretty darned easy to pull off a nutritional "science" hoaxhttp://boingboing.net/2015/05/28/its-pretty-darned-easy-to-pu.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/05/28/its-pretty-darned-easy-to-pu.html#commentsThu, 28 May 2015 13:00:50 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=391840
John Bohannon teamed up with a German documentary crew to undertake a crappy junk-science study on the effects of bitter chocolate on weight loss, and managed to push their hoax to major media outlets all over the world -- here's how.]]>
John Bohannon teamed up with a German documentary crew to undertake a crappy junk-science study on the effects of bitter chocolate on weight loss, and managed to push their hoax to major media outlets all over the world -- here's how.

First, they created a fake science institute, The Institute of Diet and Health, and then recruited a friendly MD to help them recruit a small number of volunteers for a weight-loss trial. The volunteers were split into three groups: a control, a low-carb group, and a low-carb group that ate bitter chocolate ("Bitter chocolate tastes bad, therefore it must be good for you").

Once the three groups had pursued their proscribed regimens for three weeks, they ran the numbers. The low-carb group and the low-carb-and-chocolate group both lost about the same amount of weight, but then the researchers paged through 18 other factors they'd measured in the study -- "weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood protein levels, sleep quality, well-being, etc" -- and cherry picked a couple of factors that looked better in the chocolate than in the low-carb group. On this basis, they were able to assert that adding chocolate to a low-carb diet made you lose weight 10 percent faster.

They wrote up a paper that contained obvious statistical canards -- small sample size, bad sampling methodology, p-hacking, poor control group analysis -- to an open access journal formerly owned by Biomedcentral, which charged them $600 for "peer review" and published it verbatim in their International Archives of Medicine, their "premier journal."

Working with medical PR flacks, they created linkbaity press-releases and spammed them all around. The releases, combined with the credibility of the journal publication, was enough to get them headlines in media outlets from Huffington Post to The Times of India -- it seemed that no one noticed that the "Institute of Diet and Health" was only a couple months old, that "Johannes Bohannon" was really John Bohannon, and that his PhD was in an unrelated scientific field.

The lesson isn't just that journalists aren't good at parsing out nutritional science news, but that the small number of rigorous findings from nutritional science are drowned out in the roaring sea of bullshit that can be trivially generated to fill our insatiable orthorexic need to figure out what we should be eating.

The only problem with the diet science beat is that it’s science. You have to know how to read a scientific paper—and actually bother to do it. For far too long, the people who cover this beat have treated it like gossip, echoing whatever they find in press releases. Hopefully our little experiment will make reporters and readers alike more skeptical.

If a study doesn’t even list how many people took part in it, or makes a bold diet claim that’s “statistically significant” but doesn’t say how big the effect size is, you should wonder why. But for the most part, we don’t. Which is a pity, because journalists are becoming the de facto peer review system. And when we fail, the world is awash in junk science.

There was one glint of hope in this tragicomedy. While the reporters just regurgitated our “findings,” many readers were thoughtful and skeptical. In the online comments, they posed questions that the reporters should have asked.

“Why are calories not counted on any of the individuals?” asked a reader on a bodybuilding forum. “The domain [for the Institute of Diet and Health web site] was registered at the beginning of March, and dozens of blogs and news magazines (see Google) spread this study without knowing what or who stands behind it,” said a reader beneath the story in Focus, one of Germany’s leading online magazines.

http://boingboing.net/2015/05/28/its-pretty-darned-easy-to-pu.html/feed0The business model of NSA apologistshttp://boingboing.net/2015/05/12/the-business-model-of-nsa-apol.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/05/12/the-business-model-of-nsa-apol.html#commentsTue, 12 May 2015 21:29:53 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=387476
Those talking heads you see on TV defending the NSA and calling for Snowden's ass in a sling? They make bank off NSA surveillance contracts.]]>
Those talking heads you see on TV defending the NSA and calling for Snowden's ass in a sling? They make bank off NSA surveillance contracts.

From former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker, who went through the regulatory revolving door and came out a lobbyist for the NSA's biggest suppliers (and who dared The Intercept to publish his ridiculous non-denial, which they did) to Fox News Military Analyst Jack Keane who parachuted out of the life of a humble four-star general and Army vice-chief of staff onto the board of NSA general contractor General Dynamics.

What's more, the press outlets who quote the hysterical TERRISTSGONNAKILLUSALL party-line these profiteers spout never ask them if their views are in any way related to the bathtubs full of money they get from the NSA's mass surveillance programs.

“The American people,” Clark said confidently during an interview on CNN, “are solidly behind the PRISM program and all that’s going on.” Appearing on Fox News, Woolsey referred to Snowden’s disclosure of documents as “damaging because it gives terrorists an idea of how we collect and what we might know.” Woolsey would later comment that Snowden “should be hanged by his neck” if convicted for treason.

The men are, and were at the time, advisors to Paladin Capital Group, an investment advisor and private equity firm whose Homeland Security Fund was set up about three months after the September 11 attacks to focus on defense and intelligence-related startups. Woolsey confirmed he is paid by Paladin Capital; Clark did not respond to a request for comment. In 2014, Paladin’s portfolio was valued at more than $587 million. At the time of Woolsey and Clark’s anti-Snowden statements, it included a stake in Endgame Systems, a computer network security company that had worked with the NSA, having reportedly counted the agency among its largest customers. Paladin was also invested in CyberCore, which had provided technological work to the NSA. Later, in 2014, Paladin invested in Shadow Networks, formerly known as ZanttzZ, which also provided tech work to the NSA.

http://boingboing.net/2015/05/12/the-business-model-of-nsa-apol.html/feed0UK Tories forged letter of support in the Telegraph from "5,000 small businesses"http://boingboing.net/2015/04/28/uk-tories-forged-letter-of-sup.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/04/28/uk-tories-forged-letter-of-sup.html#commentsWed, 29 Apr 2015 05:52:19 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=383480
David Cameron tweeted it and the Telegraph published the letter on the front page, listing 5,000 businesses who endorsed the Conservative Party in the General Election, many of which weren't businesses, weren't supporting the Tories, were repeat entries, or were individual employees of businesses who were incorrectly presumed to speak for their employers.]]>
David Cameron tweeted it and the Telegraph published the letter on the front page, listing 5,000 businesses who endorsed the Conservative Party in the General Election, many of which weren't businesses, weren't supporting the Tories, were repeat entries, or were individual employees of businesses who were incorrectly presumed to speak for their employers.

The "5,000 businesses" who signed the letter included charities (that aren't businesses); businesses that didn't actually sign it (many, many of these); local Conservative clubs; the same businesses listed repeatedly -- "party members, candidates, cronies, retirees, volunteers, barristas, funeral parlour consultants, people who never signed it, people who have asked to be taken out, dissolved and liquidated businesses, people who responded four times, ghosts and the neighbour’s dog."

The Telegraphy is often called the "Torygraph" for its partisan support of the UK Conservatives.

The letter itself originated with Conservative Campaign Headquarters, though this was not mentioned in the Telegraph's version of it.

If you want to know how actual small business owners in the UK feel about the election, here's some actual research on the subject: tl;dr: 21.7% support Labour, 20.9% support the Tories; 9.4% support UKIP; 7.7% support the Greens; 5.2% are Libdems; 4.1% are voting Other; and the rest (31.0%) are undecided.

UPDATE 20:00: I am beginning to have very serious doubts as to how many of even the legitimate businesses on the list actually signed anything. Aurum Solutions have issued a statement. Their sales director received an email from Brady “and recalls clicking on the link to find out more”. That’s it. He does not recall signing anything and denies strongly providing any information about the company. Could it be that this was merely an aggressive piece of spamming, where database entries referring to people and their workplace were signed up to this shambles at the mere click of the link?

http://boingboing.net/2015/04/28/uk-tories-forged-letter-of-sup.html/feed0Imaginary ISIS attack on Louisiana and the twitterbots who loved ithttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/08/imaginary-isis-attack-on-louis.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/08/imaginary-isis-attack-on-louis.html#commentsSun, 08 Mar 2015 16:00:37 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=370436
Gilad Lotan has spotted some pretty sophisticated fake-news generation, possibly from Russia, and possibly related to my weird, larval twitterbots, aimed at convincing you that ISIS had blown up a Louisiana chemical factory.]]>
Gilad Lotan has spotted some pretty sophisticated fake-news generation, possibly from Russia, and possibly related to my weird, larval twitterbots, aimed at convincing you that ISIS had blown up a Louisiana chemical factory.

On September 11, 2014, Lotan, a data scientist, started researching a massive, coordinated, and failed hoax to create panic over an imaginary ISIS attack on a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana. The hoax included Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia identities (some apparently human piloted, others clearly automated) that had painstakingly established themselves over more than a month. Also included: fake news stories, an imaginary media outlet called "Louisiana News," and some fascinating hashtag trickery whereby a generic hashtag was built up in Russian Twitter by one set of bots, then, once trending, was handed over to a different set of English-language bots that used it to promote the hoax.

More interesting is the fact that the hoax failed. Lotan shows that Facebook's Edgerank proved to be resistant to gaming using the process employed by the hoax's creator(s); that Twitter clusters can be trumped by real news sources; and that Wikipedia's vigilance was adequate to catching fakesters who create hoax pages.

Lotan has some important thoughts on the future of fake news, hoaxes and political manipulation. One important takeaway from Lotan's analysis is that, despite the energy and technical sophistication of the attack, the hoaxer(s) made some dumb mistakes, like not giving their fake Wikipedian a richer, longer edit history; and not changing the sent-by string on their twitterbots (all the hoax tweets were sent by an app called "mass post" or "mass post2."

Finally, I'm fascinated to see that the bot-tweets were sufaced into real Twitter by long-standing, still-extant, apparently human piloted accounts from Russian Twitter. Are @GelmutKol, @Kiborian and @Galtaca sleeper agents who carry on normal Twitter discourse for years at a time, but every now and again promote botnoise into real Twitter? Are they regular users whose compromised PCs (or stolen passwords) are used to push out messages every now and again? Or are they spectacularly subtle bots themselves, computationally intensive members of the botherd who pass among humans?

Did this stuff kick off in Russia? Or was it a false flag from non-Russians using Russian Twitter to point attention overseas? Or a Russian firm working for hire on behalf of foreigners? Why try to create gwot-panics on Sept 10? It's head-spinningly futurismic.

There’s a very important lesson learned here, crystallized by the network graph to the left. No matter how much volume, how many tweets, or Facebook likes a campaign generates, if the messages aren’t embedded within existing networks of information flow, it will be very difficult for information to actually propagate. In the case of this hoax on Twitter, the malicious accounts are situated within a completely different network. So unless they attain follows from “real accounts,” they can scream as loud as they’d like, still no one will hear them. One way to bypass this is by getting your topic to trend on Twitter, increasing visibility significantly.

Social networked spaces make it increasingly difficult for a bot or malicious account to look like a real person’s account. While a profile may look convincingly real — having a valid profile picture, posting human readable texts, and sharing interesting content — it is hard for them to fake their location within the network; it is hard to get real users to follow them. We can clearly see this in the image above: the community of Russian bots are completely disconnected from any other user interacting with the hashtag.

The same principle holds for Wikipedia, which is even harder to game as it is easy to identify those accounts who are not really connected to the larger editing community. The more time you spend making relevant edits and the more trusted your account becomes the more authority you gain. One can’t simply expect to appear, make minor edits on three pages, and then put up a page detailing a terror act without seeming suspicious.

As our information landscapes evolve over time, we’ll see more examples of ways in which people abuse and game these systems for the purpose of giving visibility and attention to their chosen topic. Yet as more of our information propagation mechanisms are embedded within networks, it will become harder for malicious and automated accounts to operate in disguise. Whoever ran this hoax was extremely thorough, yet still unable to hack the network and embed the hoax within a pre-existing community of real users.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/08/imaginary-isis-attack-on-louis.html/feed0Telegraph's lead political writer resigns because of censorship of criticism of advertisers, especially HSBChttp://boingboing.net/2015/02/18/telegraphs-lead-political-wr.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/02/18/telegraphs-lead-political-wr.html#commentsWed, 18 Feb 2015 17:21:42 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=365594
Peter Osborne was the head political writer at the Telegraph, a rock-ribbed conservative paper owned by the shadowy Barclay brothers; he quit after seeing the paper soft-pedal and downplay scandals involving its major advertisers, and broke his silence once he learned that the paper had squashed stories of illegal tax-avoidance schemes run by HSBC.]]>
Peter Osborne was the head political writer at the Telegraph, a rock-ribbed conservative paper owned by the shadowy Barclay brothers; he quit after seeing the paper soft-pedal and downplay scandals involving its major advertisers, and broke his silence once he learned that the paper had squashed stories of illegal tax-avoidance schemes run by HSBC.

Writing in Opendemocracy, Obsorne paints a picture of a newspaper where the owners and editor-in-chief have slashed payroll and refused to allow its investigative and editorial writers to address widely publicized scandals involving the paper's star advertisers, while running long, vacuous pieces about those firms' trivia, such as a story about cat that lives in a Tesco store.

That was how matters stood when, on Monday of last week, BBC Panorama ran its story about HSBC and its Swiss banking arm, alleging a wide-scale tax evasion scheme, while the Guardian and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published their 'HSBC files'. All newspapers realised at once that this was a major event. The FT splashed on it for two days in a row, while the Times and the Mail gave it solid coverage spread over several pages.

You needed a microscope to find the Telegraph coverage: nothing on Monday, six slim paragraphs at the bottom left of page two on Tuesday, seven paragraphs deep in the business pages on Wednesday. The Telegraph’s reporting only looked up when the story turned into claims that there might be questions about the tax affairs of people connected to the Labour party.

After a lot of agony I have come to the conclusion that I have a duty to make all this public. There are two powerful reasons. The first concerns the future of the Telegraph under the Barclay Brothers. It might sound a pompous thing to say, but I believe the newspaper is a significant part of Britain’s civic architecture. It is the most important public voice of civilised, sceptical conservatism.

Telegraph readers are intelligent, sensible, well-informed people. They buy the newspaper because they feel that they can trust it. If advertising priorities are allowed to determine editorial judgments, how can readers continue to feel this trust? The Telegraph’s recent coverage of HSBC amounts to a form of fraud on its readers. It has been placing what it perceives to be the interests of a major international bank above its duty to bring the news to Telegraph readers. There is only one word to describe this situation: terrible. Imagine if the BBC—so often the object of Telegraph attack—had conducted itself in this way. The Telegraph would have been contemptuous. It would have insisted that heads should roll, and rightly so.

http://boingboing.net/2015/02/18/telegraphs-lead-political-wr.html/feed0Why journalists should be free speech partisanshttp://boingboing.net/2014/12/03/why-journalists-should-be-free.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/12/03/why-journalists-should-be-free.html#commentsThu, 04 Dec 2014 06:00:02 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=351194
Following on the New York Times's decision to continue its critical coverage of China, despite the Chinese government's retaliation against it, Dan Gillmor calls on journalists and news organizations to abandon the pretense of "neutrality" and take a partisan stand for free speech in questions of censorship, surveillance, net neutrality, copyright takedown, and other core issues of speech in the 21st century.]]>
Following on the New York Times's decision to continue its critical coverage of China, despite the Chinese government's retaliation against it, Dan Gillmor calls on journalists and news organizations to abandon the pretense of "neutrality" and take a partisan stand for free speech in questions of censorship, surveillance, net neutrality, copyright takedown, and other core issues of speech in the 21st century.

What are these choke points? The most obvious is what’s happening to the Internet itself. In America and a number of other countries the telecommunications industry — often working with government, and in some cases outright owned by government — is deciding, or insisting on the right to decide, what bits of information get to people’s devices in what order and at what speed, or whether they get there at all. This is what network neutrality is all about in the U.S.: whether we, at the edges of the networks, get to make those decisions or whether telecom companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T will ultimately have that power, as they insist they need. The worries about corporate media consolidation in the 1990s seem quaint next to this kind of consolidation. Free speech? It’ll be as free a Comcast et al want it to be if they get the upper hand.

Surveillance, too, has become a method for government — again, often working with big companies — to keep track of what journalists and activists are doing, well beyond the avowed mission of stopping terrorism and solving crimes.

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/03/why-journalists-should-be-free.html/feed0Verizon's new big budget tech-news site prohibits reporting on NSA spying or net neutralityhttp://boingboing.net/2014/10/29/verizons-new-big-budget-tech.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/10/29/verizons-new-big-budget-tech.html#commentsWed, 29 Oct 2014 13:54:29 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=341582
They're positioning the new site "Sugar String" as a well-funded competitor to Wired, but reporters are not allowed to mention NSA spying (in which Verizon was an enthusiastic partner) or net neutrality (which Verizon has devoted itself to killing, with campaigns of overt lobbying and covert dirty tricks).]]>
They're positioning the new site "Sugar String" as a well-funded competitor to Wired, but reporters are not allowed to mention NSA spying (in which Verizon was an enthusiastic partner) or net neutrality (which Verizon has devoted itself to killing, with campaigns of overt lobbying and covert dirty tricks).

Cole Stryker, Sugar String's editor-in-chief, sent recruiting letters to reporters last week offering them jobs at the site on the condition that they pretend that the major investor's major embarrassments -- which have made headlines all over the world on a virtually daily basis -- didn't exist.

Reporters are, however, permitted to write about net neutrality violations and mass surveillance by governments not allied to the US, particularly China.

This is part of a worrying trend: as Patrick Howell O'Neill points out, Chevron bought the Richmond Standard with money it found between the sofa cushions and now the paper reports on everything except negative press about Richmond's enormous Chevron refinery.

Virtually every story currently on the front page of SugarString—articles about GPS being used by law enforcement, anonymity hardware enabling digital activists, and artists on the Deep Web—would typically include information on American surveillance of the Internet or net neutrality to give the reader the context to make sure she’s fully informed.

But none of the current articles do that. At best, they dance around the issue and talk about how other countries aside from the U.S. conduct surveillance. That self-censorship puts blinders on the reader, never giving her all the information she should have—information that, not coincidentally, tends to make Verizon and other powerful interests look very, very bad.

http://boingboing.net/2014/10/29/verizons-new-big-budget-tech.html/feed0Why (and how) games are arthttp://boingboing.net/2014/10/19/why-and-how-games-are-art.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/10/19/why-and-how-games-are-art.html#commentsSun, 19 Oct 2014 21:54:27 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=338933
I sat down for an interview with the LA Times's Hero Complex to talk about my book In Real Life (I'm touring it now: Chicago tomorrow, then Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Warsaw, London...), and found myself giving a pretty good account of why games are art, and how the art of games works:

CD: The point of any art is to make you feel some irreducible, numinous, complicated emotion.

]]>
I sat down for an interview with the LA Times's Hero Complex to talk about my book In Real Life (I'm touring it now: Chicago tomorrow, then Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Warsaw, London...), and found myself giving a pretty good account of why games are art, and how the art of games works:

CD: The point of any art is to make you feel some irreducible, numinous, complicated emotion. The characters in a story are inconsequential, literally (Romeo and Juliet never lived, never died, and are less worthy of our sympathy and care than the bacterial culture in my yogurt this morning, because at least that was a real, living thing). Insofar as imaginary people matter, it’s because their made-up, not-real adventures make you feel those complicated and interesting emotions. But it’s a very roundabout way of getting people to feel stuff. Novels do it by tricking your limbic system into mistaking the adventures of not-real people for things happening to real people.

Games and comics do it differently — there’s some of that “caring about not-real people” stuff, but there’s also a lot more of the “here’s a visual image that, because of its own formal characteristics, its colors and composition, makes you feel a thing just by looking at it.” The relationship between words about made-up people and pictures is like the relationship between talk-therapy and SSRIs — the former is supposed to get your brain to generate interesting psychological effects, the latter just imposes the effects right on your brain by altering its chemical makeup.

Games have other mechanics, of course, that are inaccessible to comics. They make you physically engage with the art, using your body (or at least your fingers) to make the art-thing happen. I think that recruiting more senses and modes probably makes the effect more immediate and possibly more profound, inasmuch as there are more mechanisms at play with which to evoke that inchoate and irreducible etcetera. There’s just stuff that you probably can’t feel (or not as readily) by reading about stuff, that’s accessible when you’re moving your body. Psychologically, of course, but physiologically too: things that happen to your brain and your thought processes when you are directing movement, as opposed to when you’re imagining it.

Games also engage a different kind of puzzle-solving mental apparatus; Raph Koster calls games something like, “NP-hard problems that can only be solved through the iterative application of heuristics.” Which is fancy math talk, but it means that games are interesting in part because they present puzzles whose ideal solutions are indeterminate — for example, there are more possible games of chess than there are hydrogen atoms in the universe, so you can’t “solve” chess the way you can tic-tac-toe, by mapping out every possible chess game and ensuring that you always play towards a non-losing outcome.

Because you can’t solve these puzzles with pure logic, you have to apply heuristics — rules of thumb — that you develop through a combination of intuition and reasoned thinking, and that you refine by trying them and varying them, more or less systematically, in order to improve your performance in the game. This variation and retrying is what Koster means by “iteration.”

This has a lot in common with “reality.” There’s no optimal way to be alive and human in the world, no Plato’s Republic course of “right action” that will reliably produce a happy outcome for you. All you can do is try your best, developing theories of how to conduct your life and refining them as time goes by.

Games, then, are microcosmic versions of life. It’s not surprising that they engage our attention and our fascination, because the reason our ancestors survived to have the children that we became is that they were reasonably good at this process. When processes like this emerge, they give us both satisfaction from mastery, and an almost irresistible urge to play on. They’re rehearsal for the only “life skill” that matters — figuring out how to come up with rules of thumb for hard problems, and how to refine them or discard them if they don’t work.

Like all the best criticism, Zhou illuminates the craft and art of using media to create aesthetic and intellectual effects, making the scene all the more impressive and tense for knowing about its underlying mechanisms.

Like all the best criticism, Zhou illuminates the craft and art of using media to create aesthetic and intellectual effects, making the scene all the more impressive and tense for knowing about its underlying mechanisms.

http://boingboing.net/2014/10/17/why-the-claricehannibal-scene.html/feed0RIP, SFBGhttp://boingboing.net/2014/10/15/rip-sfbg.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/10/15/rip-sfbg.html#commentsWed, 15 Oct 2014 17:27:03 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=338344
The San Francisco Bay Guardian has ceased publication after 48 years of yeoman service to the Bay Area. It will be sorely missed.]]>
The San Francisco Bay Guardian has ceased publication after 48 years of yeoman service to the Bay Area. It will be sorely missed.
]]>http://boingboing.net/2014/10/15/rip-sfbg.html/feed0How AIs are rewriting photographic historyhttp://boingboing.net/2014/10/07/how-ais-are-rewriting-photogra.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/10/07/how-ais-are-rewriting-photogra.html#commentsTue, 07 Oct 2014 07:56:48 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=336365
If you send your holiday photos to Google's Autoawesome processor, it will snip out the best smiles and poses and combine them to make pictures of scenes that never actually happened.]]>
If you send your holiday photos to Google's Autoawesome processor, it will snip out the best smiles and poses and combine them to make pictures of scenes that never actually happened.

AI researcher Rob Smith was struck by this when he uploaded a burst series of holiday photos to the system and got back a picture that tweezed out the best smiles from several exposures and combined them with the best poses from others.

As I pointed out to him when we discussed this over lunch recently, the real lesson here is that photos are never a neutral record of history, and always emphasize or downplay different aspects of the scene. But as Rob counters, "But I’m reasonably sure you wouldn’t say that if this were a photo of Obama and Putin, smiling it up together, big, simultaneously happy buddies, at a Ukraine summit press conference. Then, I think algorithms automatically creating such symbolic moments would be a concern."

Note the position of my hands, the fellow in the background, and my wife’s smile. Actually, these photos were a part of a “burst” or twelve that my iPhone created when my father-in-law accidentally held down the button too long. I only uploaded two photos from this burst to see which one my wife liked better.

So Google’s algorithms took the two similar photos and created a moment in history that never existed, one where my wife and I smiled our best (or what the algorithm determined was our best) at the exact same microsecond, in a restaurant in Normandy.

So what? Good for the algorithm’s designers, some may say. Take burst photos, and they AutoAwesomely put together what you meant to capture: a perfectly coordinated smiley moment. Some may say that, but honestly, I was a bit creeped out.

http://boingboing.net/2014/10/07/how-ais-are-rewriting-photogra.html/feed0US Forestry Service wages war on photography in national forestshttp://boingboing.net/2014/09/26/us-forestry-service-wages-war.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/09/26/us-forestry-service-wages-war.html#commentsFri, 26 Sep 2014 19:00:54 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=334181
The new, stupid ban on "professional" photography violates the First Amendment, the Service admits that there's no actual need for it, and it will undermine the visibility of the national forests at a time when they are under unprecedented threat from developers, the energy sector, and mining.]]>
The new, stupid ban on "professional" photography violates the First Amendment, the Service admits that there's no actual need for it, and it will undermine the visibility of the national forests at a time when they are under unprecedented threat from developers, the energy sector, and mining.

Under a two-year-old rule that is about to pass into law, the Forestry Service will require "members of the press" to pay for a permit before making any recordings or still images in the 193 million acres of US national forests. Though the rule has been in place for two years, it seems that no one has actually ever applied it -- but once it's a law, the Forestry Service has vowed to start.

Any "journalist" in the forests needs to pay $1500 for a permit, and will face fines of $1000 per shot for unauthorized photos. Members of the press who shoot in US national forests are already required to follow the same rules as everyone else -- leave-no-trace camping, not disrupting others -- and the Forestry Service can't cite any problems that this is supposed to solve ("It's not a problem, it's a responsibility," -Liz Close, acting wilderness director for the Forestry Service).

"When the Wilderness Act was created in 1964, there were plenty of people doing photography," he says. "Nothing in the Wilderness Act says photography is not approved or banned."

When he goes out to shoot, Essick takes the utmost care to the follow the rules of "leave no trace," and he does it with 65 pounds of gear on his back. He's a nature photographer: Not trashing the place is pretty much rule number one.

There's another layer to this, too. The USFS and the other agencies have used photography since their inception to tell the story of the wilderness. All the words in the world can't show you as much as one beautiful Ansel Adams photo. Coincidentally, Essick spent lots of time photographing the Ansel Adams Wilderness, named for the famous photographer, for his own book.

Over and over again, the establishment of an American wilderness, the National Parks, the core idea that you can escape to a more primitive, but nonetheless essential part of this country, has been referred to as America's best idea. It's why city-dwelling, suburb-raised punks like me can have so many feelings toward land that has filled our lungs with fresh air and our hearts with wonder. It's why I swell with pride when my little sister, gritting her teeth through cuts and tears, finished her first hike. It's why I look forward to enjoying it with my children when they come along.

http://boingboing.net/2014/09/08/alameda-county-sheriff-boots-m.html/feed0Newspapers are, pretty much, dead.http://boingboing.net/2014/08/21/newspapers-are-pretty-much-d.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/08/21/newspapers-are-pretty-much-d.html#commentsThu, 21 Aug 2014 21:00:09 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=326121
Clay Shirky has some some truths: "Maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day.]]>
Clay Shirky has some some truths: "Maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day. Perhaps advertisers will decide 'Click to buy' is for wimps. Mobile phones: could be a fad. After all, anything could happen with print. Hard to tell, really."

The other significant point is that journalists are being kept deliberately in the dark about the fortunes of their employers. When asked to estimate their own circulation, they overestimate it by an order of magnitude. It's the sharp between the newsroom and the business side: "

It’s tempting to try to find a moral dimension to newspapers’ collapse, but there isn’t one. All that’s happened is advertisers are leaving, classifieds first, inserts last. Business is business; the advertisers never had a stake in keeping the newsroom open in the first place. This disconnection between the business side and the news side was celebrated as a benefit, right up to the moment it became an industry-wide point of failure.

]]>
According to a Yougov poll, 64% of Britons believe Wikipedia tells the truth "a great deal" or "a fair amount."

The BBC scored 61%, while The Times and The Guardian got 45%. The Sun and other tabloids scored 13%. The research was cited by Jimmy Wales during last weekend's Wikimania conference (Wikipedia scored well against the Encyclopedia Britannica for trust).

http://boingboing.net/2014/08/11/brits-trust-wikipedia-more-tha.html/feed0Claims of looting at MH17 crash-sitehttp://boingboing.net/2014/07/20/claims-of-looting-at-mh17-cras.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/07/20/claims-of-looting-at-mh17-cras.html#commentsSun, 20 Jul 2014 16:00:51 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=319530
An article in The Wire, citing mostly tabloid and Ukrainian government sources, claims that locals and separatists looted the wreckage of MH17, creating difficulties for forensic investigators.]]>
An article in The Wire, citing mostly tabloid and Ukrainian government sources, claims that locals and separatists looted the wreckage of MH17, creating difficulties for forensic investigators.

The news, which cites overheated Facebook posts from Ukraine's interior minister, claims that the looters targeted cash, jewelry and credit cards especially. A USA Today article points that that whether or not there was systematic looting, the local authorities did not undertake a "grid walk" to catalog debris and search the site.

http://boingboing.net/2014/07/20/claims-of-looting-at-mh17-cras.html/feed0Newspapers' unmatched credulity about their own futurehttp://boingboing.net/2014/07/18/newspapers-unmatched-credulity.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/07/18/newspapers-unmatched-credulity.html#commentsSat, 19 Jul 2014 03:00:58 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=319227
American Society of News Editors president David Boardman rails against the happy-talk optimism of the newspaper industry, who insist that the decline isn't that bad and will shortly turn around.]]>
American Society of News Editors president David Boardman rails against the happy-talk optimism of the newspaper industry, who insist that the decline isn't that bad and will shortly turn around.

But Boardman points out that the newspaper industry's statistics are extremely selective, and their repetition in the press represents a credulous approach to business claims that no other industry gets from the fourth estate. For example, the industry says that newspapers "reach" more than half of US adults, but "reach" means, "is read once a week or more." And those readers are aging out: one major daily had its readers' average age rise from 55 to 60 in 18 months. The future readers of papers "may soon be reading pass-around copies in the nursing home."

Boardman cites Clay Shirky's excellent "Nostalgia and Newspapers," but he's more optimistic than Shirky. Boardman thinks that Sunday papers still hold a place in readers heart, and wants the industry to focus on "a superb, in-depth, last-all-week Sunday (or better yet, Saturday) paper, a publication so big and rich and engaging that readers will devour it piece by piece over many days, and pay a good price for that pleasure."

Some of Boardman's brutal debunking of newspaper industry stats:

What she said: “Total revenue for the multiplatform U.S. newspaper media business amounted to $37.59 billion in 2013.” What she didn’t say: It was a billion dollars more than that in 2012, $2 billion more in 2011, and $12 billion more in 2006. In other words, it’s dropped by a third in seven years and continues to fall with no end in sight.

What she said: “The printed newspaper continues to reach more than half of the U.S. adult population.” What she didn’t say: But the percentage of Americans who routinely read a printed paper daily continues its dramatic decline, and is somewhere down around 25 percent. “Reaching” in Little’s reference can mean those people read one issue in the past week; it doesn’t mean they are regular daily readers of the printed paper.

What she said: “This is not an audience that will be abandoning newspapers anytime soon.” What she didn’t say: But they may soon be reading pass-around copies in the nursing home. I recently learned from internal sources that for one major newspaper, the average age of its daily readers moved from 55 to 60 in just 18 months. What will it be by 2020?

http://boingboing.net/2014/07/18/newspapers-unmatched-credulity.html/feed0CHP patrolman videoed beating homeless black woman by roadsidehttp://boingboing.net/2014/07/10/chp-patrolman-videoed-beating.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/07/10/chp-patrolman-videoed-beating.html#commentsFri, 11 Jul 2014 01:00:09 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=317344
An LA driver caught video of a California Highway Patrolman tackling a homeless black woman walking by the side of the road and then repeatedly punching her in the face.]]>

An LA driver caught video of a California Highway Patrolman tackling a homeless black woman walking by the side of the road and then repeatedly punching her in the face.

Commentators are comparing the incident to the beating of Rodney King. The unnamed officer is reported to have said that the woman wandered into traffic and did not obey his orders, which surely justifies smashing her face in. For her own safety, you understand.

But Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a local activist and author of several books on the black image in America, takes a decidedly different view, saying this latest beating has provoked the same anger and rage from community residents as the King beating, and sparked demands for federal and state probes, and prosecution of the officer or officers.

"It's no exaggeration to say this is a Rodney King II case. The parallels are obvious,” he says. “Two police officers physically assaulting a woman, the woman is African-American, and the assault is captured by a passing civilian with his camera in all its graphic, gory, and shocking detail.”

http://boingboing.net/2014/07/10/chp-patrolman-videoed-beating.html/feed0How to save the CBC, making it a global online participatory leaderhttp://boingboing.net/2014/07/10/how-to-save-the-cbc-making-it.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/07/10/how-to-save-the-cbc-making-it.html#commentsThu, 10 Jul 2014 17:53:27 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=317470
In my latest Guardian column, What Canada's national public broadcaster could learn from the BBC, I look at the punishing cuts to the CBC, and how a shelved (but visionary) BBC plan to field a "creative archive" of shareable and remixable content could help the network lead the country into a networked, participatory future.]]>
In my latest Guardian column, What Canada's national public broadcaster could learn from the BBC, I look at the punishing cuts to the CBC, and how a shelved (but visionary) BBC plan to field a "creative archive" of shareable and remixable content could help the network lead the country into a networked, participatory future.

The CBC, at least, has only limited delusions about the importance of commercialising its archives, especially when that comes at the expense of access to the archives for Canadians. Canada is a young nation, and the CBC has been there with Canadians for about half of the country's short life. The contents of the CBC's archives are even more central to the identity of Canadians that the BBC's is to Britons.

If the CBC is to be cut and remade as a digital-first public service entity, then a Canadian Creative Archive could be one way for it to salvage some joy from its misery. There's nothing more "digital first" than ensuring that the most common online activities – copying, sharing, and remixing – are built into the nation's digital heritage.

What's more, the CBC's situation is by no means unique. In an era of austerity, massive wealth inequality, industrial-scale tax-evasion and totalising market orthodoxy, there's hardly a public broadcaster anywhere in the world that isn't facing brutal cuts that go to the bone and beyond.

All of these broadcasters have something in common: they produced their massive archives at public expense, for the public's benefit, and have made only limited progress in giving the public online access to those treasures.

http://boingboing.net/2014/07/10/how-to-save-the-cbc-making-it.html/feed0Horror movies and the Haunted Mansionhttp://boingboing.net/2014/06/28/horror-movies-and-the-haunted.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/06/28/horror-movies-and-the-haunted.html#commentsSat, 28 Jun 2014 19:00:05 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=314895
Long Forgotten continues its masterful inquiry into the horror movies that gave rise to Disney's Haunted Mansion.
This installment investigates the influence of three films: The Uninvited (one of the first horror movies to play for scares instead of laughs), 13 Ghosts (which brings us the idea of collecting ghosts to haunt your empty haunted house), and The Innocents (a scary-as-hell adaptation of Turn of the Screw, which gives us the corridor of doors):

It's 1960 and William Castle has found yet another way to suck loose change out of kids' pockets.

]]>
Long Forgotten continues its masterful inquiry into the horror movies that gave rise to Disney's Haunted Mansion.
This installment investigates the influence of three films: The Uninvited (one of the first horror movies to play for scares instead of laughs), 13 Ghosts (which brings us the idea of collecting ghosts to haunt your empty haunted house), and The Innocents (a scary-as-hell adaptation of Turn of the Screw, which gives us the corridor of doors):

It's 1960 and William Castle has found yet another way to suck loose change out of kids' pockets. This time it's a low-budget haunted house flick filmed in "Illusion-O," a typically schlocky Castle gimmick. The story in 13 Ghosts is pretty silly, and the special effects are only "special" in the same sense as "Special Olympics," but all is forgiven, because it's entertaining enough to carry you the necessary 84 minutes. Your eyes shall roll, but there are one or two legitimate scares (although not from the ghosts), and it's got a nice twist ending (even if it gets started a little too early). You also get a darn good performance from 11-year old Charles Herbert, a 21-year old Jo Morrow to ogle, and of course, the lovely Margaret Hamilton at no extra charge. Oh, and there's the telegram delivery guy near the beginning. Damn, he's good...

http://boingboing.net/2014/06/28/horror-movies-and-the-haunted.html/feed050,000 march against austerity in London, BBC doesn't noticehttp://boingboing.net/2014/06/22/50000-march-against-austerity.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/06/22/50000-march-against-austerity.html#commentsMon, 23 Jun 2014 06:50:42 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=313233
Joly writes, "It seems the BBC are capable of tracking down a single Scot in Brazil who cheered a goal against England but fail to notice 50,000 demonstrating on their doorstep." The Guardian noticed.]]>

An estimated 50,000 people marched from the BBC's New Broadcasting House in central London to Westminster.

"The people of this building [the House of Commons] generally speaking do not represent us, they represent their friends in big business. It's time for us to take back our power," said Brand.

"This will be a peaceful, effortless, joyful revolution and I'm very grateful to be involved in the People's Assembly."

"Power isn't there, it is here, within us," he added. "The revolution that's required isn't a revolution of radical ideas, but the implementation of ideas we already have."

A spokesman for the People's Assembly, which organised the march, said the turnout was "testament to the level of anger there is at the moment".

BBC and press ignore massive demonstration against austerity in London
]]>http://boingboing.net/2014/06/22/50000-march-against-austerity.html/feed0Newspapers' nostalgia has deluded them into thinking print can be "saved"http://boingboing.net/2014/06/18/newspapers-nostalgia-has-del.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/06/18/newspapers-nostalgia-has-del.html#commentsWed, 18 Jun 2014 22:00:05 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=312166
As Register Newspapers' high-profile paywall experiment implodes, Clay Shirky offers an acerbic obituary and a dire warning in Nostalgia and Newspapers, which discusses the futility of trying to "save" print, and the news industry's enormous, wishful-thinking blindspot about its own business.]]>
As Register Newspapers' high-profile paywall experiment implodes, Clay Shirky offers an acerbic obituary and a dire warning in Nostalgia and Newspapers, which discusses the futility of trying to "save" print, and the news industry's enormous, wishful-thinking blindspot about its own business.

In the same piece where he lauds Kushner, Chittum waits til 2/3rds of the way through to point out that the core of Freedom’s strategy “has been unsuccessful most places it’s been tried”, and buries his most important observation — it will probably fail — at the very end of the piece.

What happened to Chittum and Doctor is endemic to media reporting generally — an industry that prides itself on pitiless public scrutiny of politics and industry has largely lost the will to cover itself with any more skepticism than sports reporters rooting for the home team. (Here’s Doctor, writing during the implosion of Freedom’s strategy: “The enthusiasm of Kushner and [partner] Spitz is hard to dislike.” What’s this, a Pharrell profile?)

When you have an audience mostly made up of nostalgists, there’s not much market demand for unvarnished truth. This kind of boosterism wouldn’t matter so much if it were only reaching weepy journos whose careers started in the Reagan administration. But the toxic runoff from CJR and Nieman’s form of unpaid PR is poisoning the minds of 19-year-olds.

We don’t have much time left to manage the transition away from print. We are statistically closer to the next recession than to the last one, and another year or two of double-digit ad declines will push many papers into 3-day printing schedules, or bankruptcy, or both. If you want to cry in your beer about the good old days, go ahead. Just stay the hell away from the kids while you’re reminiscing; pretending that dumb business models might suddenly start working has crossed over from sentimentality to child abuse.